Colonial Pipeline pushes to recover from cyberattack
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Last Updated: May 10, 2021, 07:53 AM IST
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Synopsis
The US oil and gas industry is used to dealing with outages, like those caused by hurricanes or other extreme weather -- see February’s winter storm in Texas. Energy companies practice for those scenarios and pride themselves on quickly restoring service.
The unprecedented shutdown of one of the largest US pipelines after it was crippled by a cyberattack has triggered warnings of major disruption to fuel supplies and concern that its restart will be neither quick nor straightforward.
Colonial Pipeline turned off key systems late Friday after an attack involving ransomware, and was still down late Saturday. There are few precise details about what happened at Colonial, which says it normally transports about 45% of all the fuel consumed on the East Coast and in the Northeast. It says it’s working to return to normal. Various branches of the US government are monitoring the situation.